On our final day, before leaving the city, we visited two important museums. The first one, The Historical Museum, is located on the prominent axis of Sarajevo, Zmaja od Bosne. The building is a simple, floating volume covered with stone cladding. It’s architecture is strongly influenced by Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition focused on the Siege, showing all sorts of items used in daily life, hand-crafter weapons, international newspapers informing about the situation in the city and lot of photos.

The second one was right next to the airport and it’s called Tunnel of Life. It follows an exciting story of an 800m long tunnel, that was secretly built underneath the Sarajevo airport and helped to transfer food, medicine into the city or help refugees escape the siege. We all agreed that the quality of the exhibition was questionable – it consists of a 16 minute-long movie that was more of an action film than a documentary, very brief exhibition showing several items and uniforms and a 25 meters long part of the tunnel itself. For an element that prominent, since it vastly contributed to survival of the whole city, this tunnel would deserve a more dignifying museum.

As our journey comes to an end, we can say that it was an intensive, stimulative trip which made us rethink many things about Sarajevo that we initially thought. During the semester we were focusing on the siege, war and violence, whereas what we realised already on the second day is that that’s exactly what people in Sarajevo can’t stand to listen anymore and want to focus on positive message. Some things just can’t be seen from afar and needed to be examined on site, as this trip clearly shows.

At the very end we want to sincerely thank all those people in Sarajevo that made us feel very welcome and helped us with our research trip. But our biggest thanks go to the whole future.lab team for making this awesome experience possible.

This day was one of the most productive ones during the whole research trip, as we managed to analyse up to three different areas. This time we didn’t choose any places that we’ve never been to, but rather areas that were already known to us.

The first one is located around Pijaca Markale,an open air market, infamous for two mortar bombardments that took place in February 1994 and August 1995, killing 68 civilians and injuring many more. That is why the war remembrance has a strong presence here, especially in form of Sarajevo roses, memorial plaques or a genocide museum. The plaques often use a term ‘Serbian criminals’, which only demonstrates the fact, that the war never really ceased to exist and that only the weapons disappeared. There were a lot of people wandering through the promenade, since it was a very pleasant Saturday day.

The second one is situated around two important buildings – Marijin Dvor and Sarajevo City Center. The first one is important because of it’s history, as it’s the first closed block in Sarajevo, built by an Austrian entrepreneur August Braun. It has a very convenient inner courtyard with three large, old plane trees. Organisers of ‘Dani arhitekture’ festival focused on this space in 2014, when they rented an apartment in this block. That lead them to realise that the courtyard is actually a public space and they tried to network it’s inhabitants. As a result of this experiment, a nice bench shaped like the block was created and installed in the space. Who knows how many inner courtyards with such qualities are there in Sarajevo to discover. The other important place, Sarajevo City Centre, is actually a shopping centre. Possibly it is a very popular space, as it was quite crowded during the day and it possibly belongs to an muslim investor, as no alcohol was sold in the grocery shop in the basement level. The whole area behind the shopping mall looked very empty and untouched, possibly awaiting to be redeveloped in a similar, commercial fashion.

The final focus area was even further away from the centre, in the modernistic part of the city, next to the Holiday Inn Hotel. As a typical modernistic urban structure, the spaces between buildings are much broader, giving them sort of an iconic look. This corresponds with their functions, because apart from a hotel, there was also a school of philosophy, a technical school and the National Museum – with a lot of parkings spaces in between.

It was July the 11th – Srebrenica Memorial Day. A huge TV Screens on the facade of a shopping mall showed a live stream from Srebrenica Memorial, the Memorial for victims of the genocide which happened in 1995 in the town of Srebrenica. Ordinary people in Sarajevo were also a part of the ceremony on this day as they wore the Flower of Srebrenica on their clothes – a small white piece of fabric with a green dot in the middle. The white part symbolises mourning women leaning over a coffin of a lost one, since the coffins in Srebrenica are covered with green fabric – as a symbol for Islam.

In the morning we met the young local photographer Armin Graca who helped us identifying the places from the collected photos we took with us to Sarajevo. The photos are taken in public space and show different scenes from the siege. Armin described his link to the city as a love-hate relationship and complained a bit about tourism, as the newly built cablecar destroyed the secrecy of his favourite place in the city: the abandoned bobsled track from the Olympic games.

In the evening we went to the centre from Ottoman era, while discussing about our general perception of public space in Sarajevo. As we already mentioned in the first blog, the parks are well maintained but there is nobody lingering there. What really annoys us are the tiny sidewalks, which sometimes just have a width of 30 centimetres.

Cozy space are mostly connected to a commercial use while green spaces and patios are often a fallow where cars are parked occasionally.

Another interesting discovery is the huge amount of small shacks for police and security employees, which are spread all over the city and can be found in front of embassies or government buildings. Probably its just the high density of embassies and government buildings which gives the impression that there are a lot of those shacks compared to the amount of inhabitants of Sarajevo. While getting closer to the centre, we feel that the space is getting more crowded, but we also discover that people are sitting on stairs, socles of statues and flowerpots, while benches are a rare occurrence.

When arriving at the Ottoman centre, Baščaršija, we felt like we would have teleported ourselves 2,000 kilometres to the east. The urban structure of Baščaršija is very different from the Austro-Hungarian one – smaller buildings, narrow streets, pavement of white stone instead of crumbled asphalt, to which we already got used in other parts of the city. One of the greatest difference was the absence of traffic, while other streets are dominated by cars. On the one hand it was a relief for our ears and lungs on the other hand we had to deal with masses of tourists and a Disney Land-related shopping experience where public space without commercialisation does not exist.

After we got through the very crowed Baščaršija, we found an empty parking lot in front of the National Library, which became the symbol of the cultural urbicide in Sarajevo. Although the rebuild National Library became an important sign for a reunited Sarajevo, the space around the building is not inviting to stay there. Was public space left out when rebuilding the city?

On our first proper day in Sarajevo we pretty much changed our perception of what we actually should do in this city. During the day we interviewed three very interesting people, who are all very important to the cultural well-being of the city.

The first interview was held on the Faculty of Architecture of University of Sarajevo. We approach a 60s modernistic building that has many fine architectural details, although the building is not well maintained. While taking a picture of it’s impressive entrance, a student passing by tells us not to bother by taking any pictures, as there is nothing nice there, but to my mind it sometimes takes an extra effort to see the beauty behind. We interview the dean, Mevludin Zečević, who talks about Sarajevo and it’s current issues with urban planning like corruption. He mentions as well his personal experience from war time.

Our second interview takes place in a flat of an apartment block in the Austro-Hungarian part of the city. We are in the office of a local organisation called Crvena (bosnian for red). Crvena is a socially progressive and critical NGO focusing on topics like feminism, urbanism and art. It’s directress, Danijela Dugandžić, discusses with us very openly our project. She states that there many people coming to Sarajevo to do a research about the war and she thinks that the people of Sarajevo are fed up with the war topic, which is nourished by the constant flow of war tourism. In her mind the inhabitants need a positive message and not something that would remind them of the violence and the siege. This is a big turning point for us because most of the literature that we researched so far focused on the siege itself and saw the inhabitants of Sarajevo as victims, whereas it looks like that they don’t really feel like that.

The last interview is very informal and takes places in a bar called Blind Tiger, which the members of the festival Days Of Architecture consider as the chamber of architects – an institution which is not existing in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We meet Nedim Mutevelic and Ervin Prasljivic, both co-founders of Days Of Architecture, along with their colleagues. We talked a lot about the festival and activities they planned and organised to strengthen the public space of Sarajevo. They shared the opinion that people here are simply fed up with the topic of war and want to live in an ordinary city. After several (happy) hours in the bar we came to the conclusion that we should focus on positive urban activities which happened after the siege.

Sarajevo used to be one of the most liveable cities in former Yugoslavia. Famous for it’s vivid atmosphere, nice people and diverse culture, where people of different believes, ethnics and nationalities lived together in harmony. It was the only city with a mosque, orthodox church, catholic church and synagogue in one single district. This ‘Golden Age’ had it’s peak in 1984 during hosting of the Winter Olympic Games, when all eyes of the world were set on this small valley city.

What used to be a city visited by people from afar became a war-zone during the Bosnian war, when the city became the longest besieged city in 20th century, spanning from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 – 1425 days in total. The city was encircled by the Yugoslav People’s Army and on daily basis shelled by mortars or shot by sharpshooters. It’s not difficult to imagine that the relationship to the public space had to change dramatically, in order to survive. If in the past the synonym for a pleasant weather was sunny and bright day, during the siege it was rain and darkness, so that they couldn’t be spotted by snipers.

As a team of three architecture students we are on our way to spend one week in this captivating city, in order to research the complicated relationship between city’s residents and it’s public space. We want to find out if there are still some visible traces of the siege in the today’s public space and secondly, how did the city handled the change of it’s public spaces after the siege.

During our research we are going to record several interviews with professionals, as well as few other interviews with locals. Furthermore we want to compare historical pictures with the current ones, in order to perceive the changing dynamics of public space. We will keep you updated about our voyage on this luck. Wish us good luck!